Dear Readers,
Magazine issues take a long, long time to make. This is the observation I make, without fail, every time a months- or years-long process of wrangling, editing, deliberating, and compiling finally results in a somewhat (or, in this case, incredibly) polished and exciting final product. I’ve been wearing various editor-shaped hats for five years now, and still, part of me holds until the very last second onto the belief that maybe, just maybe, this issue won’t come together. Maybe this will be the time the project fails. That hasn’t happened yet (not least because I never, truly, work alone), though such an event remains perpetually and hauntingly possible, hanging like a shadow in the depths of my imagination. There will be a moment when everything will fall apart, and then what will you do?
Perhaps it’s fitting that smoke + mold’s special issue on disability justice opens with a reflection on my own, somewhat-ironic fear of failure—somewhat ironic because I am disabled, I am Mad, and (as a result) I fail against the norms of abled and sane society every day, just by existing (never mind whatever else I get up to!) On the other hand, the kinds of failure I fear/ed the most, those I reference in the above paragraph, are not so much modes of noncompliance but forms of collapse. So much of being politically disabled—and, indeed, of being politically trans, and intersections therein—is delineating the kinds of failure that are life-giving from those that are life-destroying. What does it take for us to fail toward something better and perhaps more beautiful, together, and what does a literary journal have to do with that?
What does it take for us to fail toward something better and perhaps more beautiful, together, and what does a literary journal have to do with that?
For starters, making judgement calls on the kinds of failure we can collectively afford has become a whole lot harder in these last few weeks. Facing the overlap of ecocide, the destruction of our meager social safety net, and multiple global genocides, including against trans people right here in the “u.s.”, what does it mean to take risks? Trans people are being erased from the public record, barred from accessing public space, restricted from traveling, and increasingly exposed to both structural and vigilante violence. At the same time, even now, the acts that I would describe as proto-genocidal are still disproportionately impacting trans people of color, especially those who are incarcerated, homeless, and/or in the gerrymandered south.
When systematic extermination is unambiguously what the christofascists in power want, what does it mean to do art and literature together?
When systematic extermination is unambiguously what the christofascists in power want, what does it mean to do art and literature together?
I admit that the answer I have today is not so different from the one I had last year, when we began planning this issue and before the fascists in charge saluted quite so enthusiastically. The answer is that our creative work not only brings us peace, clarity, and community in times of crisis, but because failures in the creative process—including the failures that visit us—are natural and indeed necessary parts of our lives. Fascistic ideologies would have us patrol the borders of our imaginations, gunning down idiosyncrasies before they reach conscious thought, but, like, c’mon. We know better.
And I do know better! Yet I write this mere days before issue 11 is set to release, beset myself by the anxiety that perhaps I won’t get an adequate editor’s note out in time; perhaps the issue will be delayed and it will be all my fault. My Mad mind finds fears to latch onto even when I know them to be trivial. So I do what I often do in times like these: walk myself backward, or sideways, into realizing what I already know: that what we are looking for when we read magazines like smoke + mold, when we deliberately open an issue titled Disability Justice, we aren’t looking for the flawless, we’re looking for ourselves. In curating this issue, my primary goal was to articulate a space of recognition, both among the creatives featured in the issue and among readers. Works featured in this issue teach us to recognize ourselves in all manner of objects: in food, in light, in trees, in bodily fluids and systems for transporting them. That we are deeply, irrevocably, lovingly, and sometimes irritatingly linked to one another, across species and spacetime, is perhaps the most profound lesson Disability Justice principles have to teach us. We move, try, fail, try again, as one.
We share an ongoing history of stubbornly stepping into the light against efforts at erasure, of refusing to submit to the very real anxieties of being the kind of bodymind marked for extermination.
Whatever you take away from this issue, remember this: we’re stuck with each other, however imperfectly, and that’s incredibly important. As trans/disabled people, we share the burden and joy of an entangled history of noncompliance, generative failure, and material resistance to social conditions that demand our disappearance. We share an ongoing history of stubbornly stepping into the light against efforts at erasure, of refusing to submit to the very real anxieties of being the kind of bodymind marked for extermination. Whatever we face in the coming months and years, we can take comfort in the fact that we have each other, that we can stand in community with human and more-than-human kin who have across space and time experienced fear, anger, and loneliness not unlike our own. And we can take comfort in the never-ending process of invention and improvisation that makes us who we are, and reminds us, along the way, that our work is worth the risk.
— Cavar, Issue 11 Lead Editor, March 2025
